Thing 40: Mashup the web

I admit I'm a little confused about what exactly a mashup is. I agree with the definition at the top of the Thing page and with the video, but then when I look at some of the links, I don't understand what makes them mashups.

I love both Pandora and last.fm. I really liked this mashup. You can add tags while the songs are playing + the love/hate/recommend buttons are there. Fantastic! I'm also going to try out bkkeepr.com This may be a way to keep track of the books that I'm reading.

The Crimereports mashup would be really useful, but it isn't set up for our area. For now I'll just have to stick with the dispatch logs and the state registry site to keep up to date with crime where I live.

I didn't create my own mashup, because I'm still a little unsure of what it means. I did copy Janine however and created a map of the places I've been. Since I'm not a world traveler like she is, I made mine just of the United States. Notice how even then, it's a little clumpy. I need to leave North Dakota! I just love it so much :)

Make yours @ BigHugeLabs.com

Thing 39: Digital Storytelling

Let me first say that I don't like scrapbooking. It takes a lot of time and if I wanted to save pictures, I'd just put them in a photo album. For this thing, I decided to try scrapblog.com. It seemed very pink which again made me a little nervous. Now, I realize scrapbooking is "girly" but couldn't they have tried to pick a more gender neutral color? Especially if they're going to call it digital storytelling?

That's getting off the point. After I got over the pinkness it seemed generally simple to use. I would've liked more "themes" to choose from but again, that's just me. As I was thinking of different applications to use digital scrapbooks, I thought of the fact that my youngest brother is graduating high school this spring. He was also the only senior on the swim team. During this past year, my mother has had to make so many different "books" for the team. For the banquet. For the parents. And now for his graduation. I stole some pictures of him off my mother's Facebook page (Yes, my mother has facebook) and tried to put together a page.

Most of them worked ok, but a few of them were really blurry when I tried to put them into the template. They were originally bigger and clearer, so I don't really know what happened there. When I was finished I noticed that scrapblog has an automatic publishing feature that will put it on your blog for you. I hit that button and wham! It worked!

awesome awesome awesome. it worked! I am amazing! awesome.

Thing 38: Screencasting

I didn't have any idea what screencasting was before starting this Thing. If we did online tutorials at our library - this would be perfect. Right now, we just offer regular computer classes, but we'll have to keep this option in our minds in the future. One small thing - if we were to have them, someone else would have to do it. I have a bad habit of highlighting whatever I'm reading on the screen. People can always tell when I was the last one on any of our staff computers because whole paragraphs will be blue. :)

I watched a few different tutorials. The screencast-o-matic seemed pretty simple, but I didn't like the red dot. Jing's tutorial was entertaining, but the product itself seemed harder. I couldn't watch more than a minute of the skitch tutorial. Wow - that was a lot of pink.

I decided to try screencast-o-matic and it was easy! I didn't know what to use as an example for my screencast, so I just signed into my blog and went into the Edit Post option. I think it worked. And I think I embedded it into my blog correctly. (crosses fingers)

Thing 37: Photo Tales

I think I signed up for a flickr account during the first round, but I don't own a camera and usually hide when other try to take pictures, so I didn't have anything to put up there. I went to flickr and searched through the Creative Commons pictures and found some that I could use to experiment with. I tried animoto and it seemed pretty easy to do. The only thing I had trouble with was adding music, but if I were using my computer at home with all my mp3s it would be a whole lot easier.

I can see us using this in the library to promote activites. We could have pictures of events and have them in a slide show. These sites would also work really well for montages at a wedding or graduation &c.

Thing 36: Comic Relief - Generate Some Fun

Wow! After Thing 35, this seems extra dumb and a complete waste of time. I'll look through these, but I don't see how I'd be able to use them in the library. And I'm not touching the Tartan link. Too many of our computers are down with viruses to screw up any more.

I managed to find 3 that were useful. Turning web pages or word documents into PDF files is by far the most useful generator on this page. Also I really liked the Son of Citation machine and EasyBib. Easybib was awesome because you could just put in the ISBN and it would automatically put it into the right format.

My random names are:
username: Mechanical Princess
Fairy name: Columbine Elfwitch
Vampire name: Demon of Wraiths

Megan Richardson's Dewey Decimal Section:

581 Specific topics in natural history

Megan Richardson = 357148938184954 = 357+148+938+184+954 = 2581


Class:
500 Science


Contains:
Math, astronomy, prehistoric life, plants and animals.



What it says about you:
You are fascinated by the world around you, and see it as a puzzle worth exploring. You try to understand how things work and how you can make them better. You might be a nerd.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

And because I got this song in my head working with all these generators:
The Holloways - Generator